


Cut the Mustard

by Aylwyyn228



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Bucky Barnes Feels, Bucky Barnes Recovering, Fluff, Light Angst, M/M, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Steve Rogers Feels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-11
Updated: 2020-03-11
Packaged: 2021-03-01 04:02:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,903
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23099032
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aylwyyn228/pseuds/Aylwyyn228
Summary: He wants Steve to be happy, desperately, and Steve wants Bucky back.He's tried. He's trying. But he feels like he's forever tripping himself up. He's trying to play the part of a man he remembers only snatches of. And he can’t help but fail.It has to stop. For Steve's sake as much as his.Which is why, in the end, he snaps.He just never expected it to be over a ham and mustard sandwich.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Comments: 14
Kudos: 122





	Cut the Mustard

Bucky likes where he is now. He's happy mostly. He can do and say and think whatever he wants. 

He's still all full up with guilt and self-loathing but he kinda likes that as well. In a twisted sort of way. It's a measure of everything they couldn't take from him. And now he's free to feel it, he will. It feels like a massive 'fuck you'.

He likes being back with Steve as well. He'd missed him, he realises, in a vague empty way that he didn't understand at the time. Like homesickness. 

So he'll take whatever to be back. Anything.

It's exhausting though. 

Because he wants Steve to be happy, desperately, and Steve wants Bucky back. 

He's tried. He's trying. But he feels like he's forever tripping himself up. He's trying to play the part of a man he remembers only snatches of. And he can’t help but fail.

It has to stop. For Steve's sake as much as his.

Which is why, in the end, he snaps.

***

He's making a sandwich. Ham and mustard. Steve's bustling about behind him doing something. And he's content, losing himself methodically in the task. 

He can let his mind go silent, sometimes, when he’s doing something with his hands. Steve says it’s different from the other times he goes away inside his own head. That he looks peaceful, but not absent. 

It’s the same feeling he used to get when he was lining up a shot, way back as far as the Western Front. 

He doesn’t tell Steve that. 

Steve is humming a tune he might have known once. Way back at the base of his skull, he can hear a woman singing the words, but it’s as if she’s in another room. He can’t place them. 

Steve is right. He does feel peaceful. 

Then... "Oh."

Steve's looking at him and he knows he's done something wrong. He feels all the guilt and disappointment well up inside him again. 

It's no longer tinged with fear. The 'oh God, please don't put me in the chair' stomach dropping dread. 

Now it's just sad.

He hates disappointing Steve as much as he’d hated disappointing Pierce, and Steve doesn’t have half the tools at his disposal for making his displeasure known. 

Steve is frowning. "You don't like mustard." 

He says it like he's explaining but Bucky just looks at him, because that's the most ridiculous thing he's ever heard. Of course he does. 

He looks down at the sandwich again, as if that's gonna have any answers. It just sits there.

And to be fair, it  _ is _ just a sandwich. 

Asking it to answer existential questions is a little unfair. 

"Yeah, I do," he says, because it’s true. 

He’d eaten mustard on the hotdog he’d bought with Sam, when he’d come down for a flying visit last month. When Steve had been busy teaching his art class at the community college.

He thinks about telling Steve that, and then decides not to. That afternoon was his, and Sam’s, and it was his memory to share or not.

Besides, he didn’t owe Steve any justification. Not over a fucking sandwich. 

Steve is just smiling patiently. The smile that says ‘I'm not going to argue with you. You'll see that I'm right.’

As if Bucky's broken. As if he doesn't know his own mind. 

God, he hates that smile.

He throws the knife down on the side and it clatters, sliding ominously close to the edge. But he doesn't care. 

"This has to stop. I'm not him. You have to stop expecting me to be him."

Steve just smiles again, says "Yes, you are, Buck." With the infuriatingly patient tone of someone who's explained this several times already. 

And he supposes that's true. He remembers it after all. But it's the memories of a lifetime ago. He isn't that boy that went to war any more than he's the kid throwing stones into the East River. 

Not anymore.

He thinks this is what being old feels like. 

"Alright, but I'm not just him." He can see Steve forming a response so he cuts him off. "I know it's not the same for you. You went to sleep and then you woke up and there was no time in between. But it wasn't like that for me. I did things." 

Steve is shaking his head. "It wasn't you."

A familiar rage is filling up from his gut. He wants to hit something. 

Has an urge to grab the knife off the side. Muscle memory. 

He doesn’t. Because he loves Steve, and he never wants to make him feel scared, however much his fingers ache to hold  _ something _ . 

He breaths. In and out. "Yes it was." 

Steve's equally emphatic. "No. It wasn't." 

He feels the whipcord of anger snap inside him but when he speaks it's icy calm. Practiced.

"I stood on a road bridge over the Canal de Marseille. It was raining. The railing was wet. I stood there until a gendarme told me to move and then I went back to base. They were… angry because I was late."

He can see Steve starting to speak. And he can’t, can’t deal with listening right now. He cuts him off again. 

"There was a girl in..." a series of flickering images dredge themselves up from his subconscious, "in Khartoum. She had dark hair. Green eyes. She smiled at me and I got distracted, lost my target. They dragged me away and beat me because I compromised the mission. Then they put me back in that fucking chair."

"Buck-"

"I slept in the world's shittiest apartment in Kiev. It was a safe house." He gets a flash of a newspaper, abandoned on a linoleum worktop. "It was 1982. November. The whole place smelt of mothballs and damp. The sheets were cold and it made me think of home, but I didn't know what that meant."

Steve's face is sad. "Bucky-"

"Don't tell me it didn't happen. I had seventy years of people telling me it didn't happen! Well, it did happen! I was there! I remember it!" 

He doesn't know at what point he started shouting. He doesn't know why really, except that it matters. Suddenly it matters more than anything in the world. 

He wants to put his fist through the worktop. He wants to tear the whole apartment apart with his bare hands because then no one can say he hadn't been here. No one could say it hadn't happened.

He's breathing heavily. 

And from the look on Steve's face he wonders for a moment if he's had one of his blanks. If any of that was real at all. 

For a moment, he thinks maybe he's just mad after all.

Then Steve sighs, rubs a hand slowly over his face as if he can avoid looking at him at all.

"I'm sorry, Buck." Steve finally meets his eye. “I thought… I thought it was best.”

Now he just feels stupid. He didn’t intend to let that part of himself out. Not ever. Certainly not to Steve, who’d never for a second doubted him. Who’d taken him back without question. 

It feels ungrateful.

He’s about to apologise, but Steve beats him to it, slumping down into the kitchen chair as he does it. Bucky follows him, cautiously because being trapped in by the table still fucks with him sometimes, the days he can’t bear Steve’s hands on him.

Steve is tapping against the table rhythmically, but Bucky doesn’t even think he’s aware of it.

He stops, looks up. That line between his brows that he gets when he’s upset. “We can talk about it, if you want to.”

Bucky’s already shaking his head. “I don’t wanna talk about it. Just don’t wanna pretend it didn’t happen.”

“I didn’t know you had missions like that.”

He shakes his head again. “I didn’t. Not often. They were mostly quick, hours, a day at most. Then they put me back under. Some of them didn’t work out that way. They didn’t like that. Didn’t like me being away. Alone.”

He gets a couple of flashes of punishment chambers. He thinks he’s getting better at keeping it off his face.

“They told me I was broken, sick. That they could fix me. I was special so they’d fix me. It was so I’d always go back if the memories started coming back. I get it now. The longer I was away the less control they had.”

He meets Steve’s eyes, hoping he won’t find disappointment there. But Steve is almost as skilfully blank as he is. Maybe he’s been taking lessons from Natasha. 

“I always went back, Steve. It scared me, feeling what I felt on the bridge, when you…” He swallows. He’s not sure when he started feeling so sick. “I wanted the emptiness. So I always went back.”

“Until you didn’t.” 

Steve’s face is so painfully earnest it’s like a physical ache and he doesn’t have the heart or the will to argue, so he just looks away. “Yeah.”

“No, listen. You said they didn’t trust you to be away for too long. That they had to lie to you, scare you, to make you come back.”

He manages to force a quick nod, but he doesn’t like where this is going. 

Steve looks like he’s been winding up to this for days, weeks. It makes a little pit open up in his stomach.

“If they didn’t trust you, it’s because they never had you, not really.”

That sounds like a whole heaping pile bullshit from where he’s sitting, but Steve needs to believe it so he won’t take it away from him. Still he can’t form the words. He can force another nod but he can’t say it. 

It’s apparently enough for Steve. He forces his own grin, and Bucky can see him trying to capture some of the levity of their morning. Bucky appreciates that. He misses the peaceful feeling, and he doesn’t want to let the darkness of his mood engulf his whole day. 

So Bucky smiles as well. 

Sam would say that was progress. 

Bucky thinks Sam’s full of bullshit sometimes, but he might choose to share this little bit of self-control. It would make Sam smile his megawatt smile, and say ‘that’s great, man.’ 

Bucky could hear that smile in his voice even when they talked on the phone. 

Steve nods towards the sandwich abandoned on the side. “You gonna eat that?” 

Bucky leans across to grab the plate off the side. It makes the side of his shirt ride up a little, and he flexes just a little more than necessary, just to see the way Steve’s eyes slide down his body. “I don’t know, are you gonna let me without pretending to be my mom?”

Steve raises his hands. “I will keep my culinary comments to myself.”

He knows he’s being watched as he picks up half the sandwich, and he’s waiting for whatever Steve’s got planned.

“Hey Buck,” Steve wheedles, and he’d be fluttering his eyelashes if he wasn’t so proud, “can I have the other half?”

“Nah, I don’t think so.” Bucky noisily licks a stray drip of mustard as it runs down his hand, enjoying the look on Steve’s face almost as much as he enjoyed the heat at the back of his tongue, “I know you never really liked ham.”


End file.
